#20 Shades and Shadows -YA

After moving to the small town of Uncertain, sixteen-year-old Ari Jones meets the very charming and very dead Samael Lowood. Great. Just when she thought her Nutter-Butter days were over. It turns out Sam is not a hallucination: he’s a real ghost. Sam introduces Ari to the wintry Darklands, one of two choices in the afterlife for ‘monsters,’ and asks her to find something called a Nanorian.

But Reid, a cardigan-wearing boy with a knack for slitting demon’s throats, wants the Nanorian too.

Forced into the search when her father is kidnapped, Ari discovers a secret world of unearthly hybrids along the way. She doesn’t fit in with them: she’s normal, never mind that she keeps getting chased by bible-quoting demons. With the help of her newfound friends—a CCR-singing witch and a conscientious vampire—she sets out to learn what exactly she and her father have to do with this madness.

And when she learns the Nanorian is actually a demon’s heart, disastrous in the wrong hands, she realizes she needs to choose carefully.

SHADES AND SHADOWS is a contemporary fantasy with the feel of a Cassandra Clare novel set against the strange and enchanting backdrop of a small Texas town. It is a story with heaps of thrills and a dash of romance.